Your Mind on Drugs

Your Mind on Drugs Every autumn, as regular as the arrival of cooler weather and a blizzard of holiday-themed advertisements, come the annual reports and recycled newspaper articles aimed at bothering readers about the prevalence of drug use among younger Americans. The annual New York "exposé" on ecstasy use by Silicon Alley grunions and Times Magazine shocker on marijuana smoking among high-schoolers are surely in preparation at the time of this writing. Meanwhile, this past Sunday's New York Post ran a very humorous report on "Coke in Clubs," in which lucky Post staffers got to visit many of the city's hotter hot spots?including Shine, Saci, Chaos, Lotus and Float?and test the tops of the toilet paper dispensers for cocaine residue. Their startling conclusion: there is a lot of cocaine use in these clubs! Club owners may be being disingenuous when they claim to be shocked when confronted with the news! We sympathize. This was certainly news to us.

Then on Monday, the Partnership for a Drug-Free America released its annual report on drug use among teens. The PDFA is a nonprofit organization formed by media professionals, which produces many of the more annoying antidrug messages you see on tv and bus shelters.

The new data, based on levels of drug use reported (a significant word) by a survey sampling of roughly 8000 seventh- through 12th-graders, indicate "Ecstasy Use Up Among Teens," as the Times hed put it. Reported use in this group has "doubled" since 1995, with one in 10 kids now saying they've "experimented with" disco biscuits. On the other hand, reported marijuana use is down?from 41 to 40 percent. This latter figure is taken by the PDFA as a hopeful sign that its multimillion-dollar ad campaigns are working.

As always when survey data are summarized in the media, these figures are cited with the greatest vagueness and should be read with extreme caution. (And PDFA figures for general drug-use trends appear to conflict with government reports.) One datum we can pass on without equivocation after absorbing these reports: Young people are experimenting with drugs! Coming this spring: the annual reports that young people are also playing violent video games, downloading smut and feeling each other up in the backs of cars.

Such revelations wouldn't be worth mentioning, if they weren't an index of the two-pronged American dishonesty when it comes to drugs. On the one hand, it's clear that "the drug problem"?at least as it expresses itself in sophisticated publications, and among the white professionals and upper-middle-class bon viveurs (and, perhaps, Post staffers) who patronize torture chambers like Chaos and Lotus?is by now a winkingly used media trope, an excuse for young writers to hit glamorous clubs periodically and?who knows??maybe snort up a couple lines themselves, all toward knowingly indulging their readership's prurience. Does anyone really believe that either New York City periodical writers or the Post's readership is scandalized by drug use in the year 2000? We've entered a queasy, Late Empire stage in our conception of drug use: so boredly familiar are we with it that we pretend to be scandalized?the ironicized "scandal" providing what's perhaps, at this point, the only thrill.

On the other hand, there's the antidrug militancy of America's professional bluenoses?such as New York state's new junior senator and the pair of statesmen competing for the presidency. As the imminent sad spectacle of Robert Downey Jr. landing back in prison for poisoning himself will demonstrate, it's hard to imagine a more destructive, dishonest cultural phenomenon than the "War on Drugs" in the service of which these three and their fellow bureaucrats have labored. Here's hoping that America can develop an attitude toward drugs that avoids both smarmy irony and bureaucratic moralism, and that instead approaches the truth: that drugs are here to stay, that people seem to like and need them, and that they should be approached with an honest, unmoralized respect for their capabilities and dangers.